arcticstoat writes: Polythene might be better known as the world's most widespread plastic, but scientists at MIT have found a way of altering the material to create heat-conducting fibres that could be used to help cool computer chips. As well as being effective heat conductors and electrical insulators, the fibres also only conduct heat in one direction, giving them an immediate advantage over metals when it comes to moving heat way from a chip. According to MIT, the transformation of the material mainly involved getting all the polymer molecules to line up the same way, rather than forming the jumbled mess of molecules that they usually form. The work is detailed in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology this month.